khalid kishtainy's new novel: 'by the rivers of babylon'

In the opening scene of “By the Rivers of Babylon”, the latest novel by the Iraqi author, satirist and columnist Khalid Kishtainy, the aunts, nieces and cousins of a family are gathered in the central courtyard (haush) of a Baghdad house. The year is 1948. The womenfolk plead with the patriarch of the house, Haj Nufal Abu Mamduh, to show mercy and forgiveness towards his unmarried 17-year-old daughter Samira, who is suspected of having fallen pregnant.

But Haj Nufal refuses to be swayed. He tells his two sons, who are armed with pistols, to take their sister to a doctor to establish whether she is pregnant. “If she has disgraced our name by becoming a plaything for some lecherous young man, she will deserve what she gets.”

The brothers take Samira to Dr Abdul Salam Sassoon, a Jewish gynecologist. They tell him that if their sister is pregnant he must cut her open, remove the fetus and show it to them. After that, “we want you to kill her and dispose of her body in your own professional way...We want no trace left of her real identity. We are a respectable family.” When he turns down their financial inducements, they threaten him with their guns. The sons might claim their family is respectable – but their father has made his money from trading in women in India.

Dr Sassoon vanishes from his home and clinic, returning after a week in a fragile emotional state. A young man, Hassun Abd al-Ali turns up at his clinic and tearfully tells him he was Samira’s lover, but Sassoon claims not to know what happened to her after he confirmed she was pregnant. The distraught Hassun goes on the run, fearing that Samira’s family will try to kill him.

Kishtainy’s novel, published by Quartet Books, traces the subsequent fates of Dr Sassoon and Hassun. Their personal stories are intertwined with the upheavals of the time, especially the creation of Israel in 1948 and the ensuing Arab-Israeli war. Such is Kishtainy’s economy of style that the novel has the feeling of an epic work, moving between Iraq, Iran and Israel and conveying a wealth of insights and incidents, and yet it is relatively short at just over 200 small pages. Kishtainy’s descriptions of places and people are highly evocative, and he has a gift for irony. He gives a rich portrait of life in Iraq, complete with the inventive, often bawdy, vernacular language.

Sassoon is driven to mental breakdown by his trauma over Samira, and spends time confined in mental hospitals. When Israel is established in May 1948 anti-Jewish feeling in Iraq rises, and Sassoon comes under suspicion from fellow patients who think he is an Israeli spy. He and Hassun both eventually end up in Israel, Sassoon as a reluctant migrant and Hassun as a prisoner of war. The novel leaves the reader guessing until its last paragraph.

At the launch of the novel last week at a reception in the Ark Gallery, West London, Kishtainy revealed that the opening chapter is based on a painful incident in his own family’s history. When he was four or five years old, his 15-year-old brother seduced and impregnated a girl. Kishtainy’s mother hid the girl in the family home, but when her husband discovered this he insisted that the girl leave the house at once. The women of the family beseeched him to save the girl’s life and to give them time to spirit her away to safety, but he refused to change his mind.

“I remember my brother leading this wretched girl, all in black, to the door,” Kishtainy said. “The door slammed behind them, a few seconds passed, the house was absolutely silent and then shots were heard from the street.” The girl’s family had killed her. Kishtainy’s brother ran away and for months the family did not know where he was. “The memory remained with me all my life, and eventually I had to download that incident into this novel.”

Some 60 years after this incident occurred, honor killings are still occurring in Iraq (where they are reportedly on the rise) and in other parts of the Middle East. Kishtainy said: “When you read this first chapter don’t think of it as fiction... it is a reality.“


The scandal over the pregnancy forced the Kishtainy family to move to another area of Baghdad. “Our house was adjacent to a cemetery and as a child I used to go there and watch the burials and lamentation, the crying and dramas. These scenes of death influenced my life and my psychology.” The young Kishtainy got to know the gravediggers, and in blackly humorous scenes in the novel Hassun takes refuge in a graveyard and works with the gravediggers, until his father recognizes him at a funeral and has him conscripted into the army.

“By the Rivers of Babylon” was also shaped by Kishtainy’s many encounters and friendships over the years with Iraqi Jews, some of whom were present at the launch. The novel gives a picture of the Iraqi Jewish community in 1940s Iraq, and of its role in professional, political and cultural life, and the pressures it came under as a result of anger over Zionism and events in Palestine.

Kishtainy describes his novel as “a homage to a wonderful community I have always treasured in my life. I wrote many years ago about them, and said I have met so many communities and minorities in the world but I found the Iraqi Jewish community the most lovable of the whole lot.”

Iraqi Jews often encountered problems when they emigrated to Israel and were for example unable to find jobs commensurate with their high level of education and qualifications. Sassoon is homesick for Iraq and tells his wife one of things he most misses is “the sight of storks on minarets.” A turning point comes when he strikes up a friendship with an American Palestinian who was born in the house in which Sassoon and his wife are living.

Kishtainy was born in Baghdad and moved to live in England after graduating from Baghdad University’s Faculty of Law and the Academy of Fine Arts. He has lived in London for many years, and has for the past 18 years been a columnist on Ash-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper. He is the author of many books in Arabic and English. “The New Statesman and the Middle East (Palestine essays)” was published in 1972 by the Palestine Research Center, and “Arab Political Humour” by Quartet in 1986.

It is only in the past decade that Kishtainy has started to write fiction. “Tales from Old Baghdad: Grandmother and I” was published in 1997 by Kegan Paul International. “Tomorrow is Another Day: A Tale of Getting By in Baghdad”, a picaresque novel set in Saddam’s Iraq, was published five years ago by Elliot and Thompson.

“By the Rivers of Babylon” is likely to find an audience not only among fiction readers, but also among historians and other scholars with an interest in Iraq. Kishtainy has a vivid recall of his childhood and youth, and has also carried out many interviews with Israelis of Iraqi origin. His novel provides much intriguing information on Iraqi society and culture.

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, 12th May 2008

benjamin gilmour's film 'son of a lion'

Australian filmmaker Benjamin Gilmour had to resort to unusual methods to make his film “Son of a Lion” in one of the most inaccessible and hazardous parts of the world to outsiders: the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. He shot the film in and around the gun-making town of Darra Adam Khel, in a tribal area which is out of bounds to foreigners. In order to avoid drawing attention to himself he became a “guerrilla filmmaker”, growing a beard and dressing in shalwar kameez and Pashtun hat so as to blend in with the locals. He had no wish to attract the attention of Pakistani intelligence agencies, or of militants.

Gilmour shot his film on a small Sony mini-DV camera so as to reduce the chances of being detected. This gives his deeply humane 92-minute first film an intimate, documentary feel. The scenery is stunning in its grandeur, with its sweeping mountains, green valleys and rich red soil. Trucks and buses painted with gaudy patterns ply the roads.

The film roles were played not by professional actors but mostly by family and friends of Gilmour’s executive producer and local “fixer” Hayat Khan Shinwari, a land owner and film buff with a particular liking for spaghetti westerns.

The main storyline tells of the clash between the longing of 11-year-old Niaz to go to school, and the insistence of his father Sher Alam Afridi that he should instead learn how to make guns in his father’s workshop. The film explores Pashtun culture and values, and the pressures the people are under. It had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February and is to be screened at several other festivals before being released in cinemas and on DVD. The producer is Carolyn Johnson, and the editor Alison McSkimming Croft

Gilmour, who turns 33 this year, worked for a number of years as a paramedic based in Sydney. He became interested in filmmaking when working as a unit nurse on UK film sets (he was a medic to Sharon Stone at one point).


He set his heart on making a film among the Pashtuns after he fell in love with the North West Frontier Province while travelling there with his girlfriend in August 2001. They went to Darra Adam Khel, famed for its manufacture of weapons. The town’s highly skilled craftsmen can make replicas of virtually any gun. The guns are regularly tested by being fired into the air.


Gilmour‘s imagination was captured by “this wild territory of handsome turbaned warriors, mud-walled fortress compounds, stark dangerous mountains, drug smuggling and vendettas.” He found the Pashtuns wonderfully hospitable.

In making “Son of a Lion”, Gilmour wanted to “try to balance out the tainted perception people in the West have of Muslims as a whole after the events of September 11.” He saw making the film as “an excellent way to carry out my goal of opposing the Islamophobia I saw around me. Islamophobia has infected a great many ordinary people around the world who simply do not have any experience of Muslim people beyond the evening news.”

Gilmour adds: “What particularly fascinated me about these rough Pashtun tribesmen was that although they were always heavily armed, they were actually more obsessed with poetry and music than weaponry. Trying to get my head around the way people of other cultures think without judging them has always been a mission of mine, and the Pashtuns seemed my greatest challenge yet.” He has written a 400-page book, “Warrior Poets”, on his journeys to Pakistan and the making of his film. It is to be published by the Murdoch Books imprint Pier 9 in June.

Before going to Pakistan to make his film, Gilmour wrote a script which ran to 110 pages. However, when his fixer and his colleagues read it they laughed at it so Gilmour ditched it and worked on a new script in close collaboration with his contacts. Much of the dialogue in the film was improvised by the actors themselves, and the writing credit on the film is “Benjamin Gilmour in collaboration with the people of Kohat and Darra Adam Khel”.

The part of Niaz is played by Hayat Khan Shinwari’s son, also called Niaz, who has an appealingly soulful face. He is wistful when he hears schoolboys on a bus talking about trigonometry, and complains to his grandmother that every day he sees children going to school while he has to work.

Niaz’s mother died when he was very young, and he sometimes visits her grave for solace. His father, played by Sher Alam Miskeen Ustad, was a fighter with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets, and he tells his son of the battles he fought against great odds and shows off his battle scars.


Sher Alam has a workshop that makes weapons from small arms to AK47s, and in the opening scene of the film he is giving Niaz a lesson in the countryside on how to fire a Smith and Wesson. “Are you a man or a girl?” he demands of his son. There is considerable emphasis on masculinity in the culture; when Niaz is taunted by the local big bully boy Pite and some other boys, he is teased for his “girly face”.

Niaz’s grandmother is fond of the boy and towards the end of the film plays a crucial part in mediating between father and son. One area of discord is that, to his father’s disapproval, Niaz loves music. At one point he peeks into a male wedding party where a rubab player is performing and a young man dancing.

There is much talk of politics among the men when they meet in the tea shop, barber, and other gathering places. They discuss 9/11, America, the Iraq war, Afghanistan. One discussion is about Osama Bin Laden and whether they would give him up in exchange for bounty, or extend hospitality. There is plenty of humor in the men’s exchanges. Niaz’s father recalls that the only film he has ever seen, back in Afghanistan, was Rambo III starring Sylvester Stallone. (In this 1988 film, Rambo goes to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahedeen against the Soviets.)


NIaz’s father’s brother Baktiyar (played by Baktiyar Ahmed Afridi) lives in the city of Peshawar, and is a relatively wealthy businessman. He tries to persuade Niaz’s father to enroll him in school, but Sher Alam is adamant: “I didn’t study, why should he?” When Niaz visits Peshawar for a dental appointment (an unexpectedly comic scene) his uncle takes him to a school where he has his first experience of being in a classroom. The uncle points out to Niaz’s father that the boy’s late mother had wanted him to be educated.

The tension between Niaz and the bullying Pite threatens to escalate when Sher Alam tells Niaz that he may have to answer Pite with a gun. He then visits Pite’s father to try and head off a confrontation, warning him it is a “clan issue”. However, when Pite is shot by another person Niaz staunches the flow of blood with his cap and helps to save his life.

Sher Alam Miskeen Usrtad gives an affecting performance as Niaz’s father. At first he seems authoritarian and harsh, but gradually he reveals his fears that his son will abandon him as his wife did when she died. When he finally agrees that Niaz should learn to read and write, he says this should be at a “proper” school. He rules out Niaz’s going to a traditional madrasa as he believes “the USA is all over them”, and says “I don’t want them to take you to Cuba and torture you.”

Music has an important part in the film. The Australian musician and composer Amanda Brown has put together a soundtrack that complements the film’s emotional power. There are also some tracks from the CD “From Cabool to California” featuring Professor John Baily on rubab, Ustadh Asif Mahmoud on tabla and John Harrelson on tanbura.

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, 5 May 2008

'stop the war' benefit

At a Stop the War Coalition benefit evening held at St James’s Church in Piccadilly, central London, last Thursday a succession of people prominent in Britain’s cultural life took to the platform to express their opposition to war through poetry, music and intimate off-the-cuff addresses.


Stop the War was founded in the days after 9/11 to oppose the “war on terror”. It organized the biggest demonstration ever seen in Britain when more than a million people took the streets of London on February 15 2003 to oppose the imminent war on Iraq. The coalition’s chair Andy Murray (pictured), who compered the benefit evening, argues that the need for Stop the War is as great as ever.

During the evening it was striking how strongly the words of poets from previous conflicts, and particularly the First and Second World Wars, still resonate today, as does the poetry of William Blake. The Stop the War convener Lindsey German read Blake’s poem London, from Songs of Experience, which begins: I wandered through each chartered street,/ Near where the chartered Thames does flow/ A mark in every face I meet,/ Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”

The veteran protest poet Adrian Mitchell read Blake’s poem The Price of Experience. He also gave a passionate rendering of one of his own best-known poems To Whom it May Concern each verse of which ends: “Tell me lies about Vietnam”. More than 40 years the poem still has much relevance: Mitchell substituted Iraq for Vietnam in the final line.

Playwright David Edgar read three poems by Berthold Brecht. The Legend of the Dead Soldier conjures up the macabre image of a dead and buried solider being dug up and returned to fight at the front. A poem written in response to a magazine image runs: “Look at the helmets of the vanquished! Yet/Surely the moment we came undone/ Was not when they were smitten from our heads/ But when we first agreed to put them on.”

The novelist A L Kennedy, who won the Costa book prize in January for her novel “Day” set in the Second World War, read from the work of poet Edmund Blunden who survived two years in the trenches of the First World War.

BBC TV journalist and former MP Martin Bell, wearing his trademark white suit, recited Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth and Siegfried Sassoon’s Everyone Sang. He also read two poems from Epitaphs of War by Rudyard Kipling, written after his son was killed at the front. Epitaph for a Dead Statesman includes the lines: “Now all my lies are proved untrue/ And I must face the men I slew”, and Epitaph for the Soldier: “If any ask why we died/ tell them because our fathers lied”. Actor Roger Lloyd-Pack (Trigger in the BBC sitcom “Only Fools and Horses”, and Owen Newitt in the “Vicar of Dibley”) recited Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting”.

Professor Jacqueline Rose, whose books include “The Question of Zion” and “The Last Resistance”, read three poems by the Israeli anti-war poet Dahlia Ravikovitch: You Can’t Kill a Baby Twice (on the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982 in Beirut), On the Attitude Towards Children in Wartime and Hovering at Low Altitude.

The editor of the medical magazine The Lancet, Dr Richard Horton, read a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid that tells of Aeaneas’ descent to the underworld. In October 2006 the Lancet published research from John Hopkins which suggested 650,000 Iraqis had died since 2003, considerably more than other estimates, and despite efforts to undermine the figures some government advisers concluded that the research on which they were based was sound.

The award-winning actress Janie Dee recounted the experience of being driven in a minicab by an Afghan man, and said: “the worst thing is meeting someone from Afghanistan or Iraq and feeling so embarrassed, because you didn’t want this [war] to happen”. She asked: “What can I do to make a difference?”

Iraqi novelist, columnist and activist Haifa Zangana, who was imprisoned under Saddam Hussein but opposed the invasion of Iraq, read a poem by the Iraqi woman poet Nazek Al-Malaika who revolutionized Arabic poetry and was a pioneer of free verse. The poem, Jamila and Us, was dedicated to the Algerian fighter for independence Jamila Bouhired.

The Muslim columnist for the Independent newspaper Yasmin Alibhai Brown said that some Arab friends had e-mailed her that day of the benefit to say “thank you to those who stand with us still.” She lamented the amount of time that has been wasted in not trying to understand the “storms in the heads” of those who carried out the attacks of 9/11 and those in London on 7/7. “That rage has been seen before” she said, reading two excerpts from her favorite writer James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time”.

Stop the War’s media officer the playwright and creative writing teacher David Wilson, who was director of the Pavarotti Music Center in Mostar, Bosnia, read a piece entitled Shadows set in 1995. It is the story “of a young woman about whom I now nothing except that on that day she was singing and wore a red dress.” It begins with the first-person narrator staying on the Croatian island of Hvar which has one of the oldest theatres in Southeast Europe. Engraved over its door are the words “built in the second year of peace 1612”.

The next day he is to return to Mostar “half a day’s drive away and yet a place as far removed from Hvar as the moon is to the earth. Mostar, an Ottoman jewel with stone houses, torturously-hot, but no sea breeze to move the sweltering air.” Mostar had been defined by its famous 16th century bridge, but this now lies “shattered at the bottom of the fast-flowing Neretva River.” In Mostar the narrator notices a young woman behind him the street singing and wearing a red dress. Then a bomb goes off. “Victims of the Hiroshima bombing left their shadows burned on the ground where they fell. Many years later, the shadow of this girl in the dress burns me still.”

The renowned Iraqi oud player Ahmed Mukhtar (pictured above) said: “My music is describing what I feel about the war.” He played a mixture of his own compositions and traditional Iraqi melodies. The composer and pianist Michael Nyman played a medley of music ending with compositions from the film “The Piano”, his most famous score. A performance by the group Peyoti for President (pictured below) provided an upbeat finale to the evening.

The evening provided an opportunity to hear an excerpt from the controversial opera “Manifest Destiny” with music by Keith Burstein and words by Dic Edwards. The opera, which centers around a female would-be suicide bomber, created a storm when it was performed at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe not long after the four suicide bombings in London. A review in the Evening Standard, which implied that Burstein glorified terrorism, is the subject of a protracted libel case brought by Burstein. The case is soon to go to the European Court of Human Rights.

In the opera a Palestinian poet Leila, who has been living in London with her Jewish music composer partner Daniel, becomes radicalized and joins a suicide bombing cell. She is betrayed to the Americans by a fellow militant who is in love with her and wants to save her from death, and is incarcerated and tortured in Guantanamo Bay.

In the compelling scene performed at the Stop the War benefit, with Burstein on piano, Leila (sung by Janet Shell, left) remembers her mother’s garden in Palestine while her jailer (Christopher Foster) is moved by her reminiscences and washes her feet while he tries to justify US actions, singing: “We are not here to hurt you/but you leave us no choice.”

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, 28th April 2008

afghan music talk in London from Prof John Baily

ASIAN MUSIC CENTRE Lecture on ‘The Art of Playing Classical Afghan Rubab’

1-2 Bradford Road, Acton London W3 7SP Tel 020 8749 9584, E-mail info@amc.org.uk, Web http://www.amc.org.uk/

Wed 30 April: 6.30 -8 pm Ticket: £3 Prof. John Baily (Goldsmiths College, London University)

Prof. John Baily will discuss and demonstrate the rich traditions of music for the Afghan rubab, as performed by great masters such as Ustad Mohammad Omar in the later part of the twentieth century. He will describe his own experiences of learning the rubab from 1973 onwards, and how he has tried to find his own style in playing the instrument.

For further information, please contact Shih-Ching Wei (“Ginger”) on ginger@amc.org.uk or 020 8749 9584

rachel corrie's writings published

Five years ago, 23-year-old American Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bulldozer in Rafah, Gaza, as she tried to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian family’s home. She was a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a non-violent group that supports the Palestinians through direct action in Gaza and the West Bank. Corrie’s horrific death on March 16 2003 sent shock waves around the world, and drew attention to the desperate situation faced daily by the Palestinians in Gaza, and to the highly questionable actions of the IDF.

Since Rachel’s death her memory has been kept alive through the Rachel Corrie Foundation, set up by her parents. In addition, Rachel’s own words and views have been brought to the public through the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” based on her e-mails and journal. The play was first staged to acclaim at the Royal Court Theatre in London in April 2005, and has since then been performed in various venues around the world.

Now, to mark the fifth anniversary of Rachel’s death, the book “Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie” is being published simultaneously in the US by W W Norton and in the UK by Granta. To publicize the book, Rachel’s parents Craig and Cindy are to embark on an eight-city book tour of the USA in April, attending book readings, signings, and question and answer sessions. The tour will take in San Francisco, Seattle, Olympia (the Corries’ home town in Washington State), Portland, Washington DC, New York, Iowa City and Minneapolis.

“Let Me Stand Alone” presents Rachel’s essays, poetry and drawings from the age of 10 to the last days of her life. Endlessly self-questioning, Rachel had decided while at school to become an artist and a writer. Her writings express her preoccupation from an early age with major questions of existence, as well as reflecting the more personal concerns experienced by a young girl growing up.

The book builds up a portrait of a remarkable young woman who combined a zest for living and a mischievous sense of humor with an unusual degree of awareness. In autumn 2002, reflecting on feelings of being alone, she wrote: “What if our aloneness isn’t a tragedy? Tragic passing of love affairs and causes and communities and peer groups. What if our aloneness is what allows us to speak the truth without being afraid? What if our aloneness is what allows us to adventure – to experience the world as a dynamic presence – as a changeable, interactive thing?”

From Rafah, she sent an e-mail to her mother a few days before her death describing how she had spent ten hours with a Palestinian family living on the front line. “When I am with Palestinian friends I tend to be somewhat less horrified than when I am trying to act in a role of human rights observer, documenter or direct action-resister,” Rachel wrote.

“They are a good example of how to be in it for the long haul. I know that the situation gets to them (and may ultimately get them) on all kinds of levels, but I am nevertheless amazed at their strength in being able to defend such a large degree of their humanity – laughter, generosity, family time – against the incredible horror occurring in their lives and against the constant presence of death.”

The Corrie family’s home town of Olympia lies not far from Seattle. Rachel’s father Craig worked for many years as an insurance executive and her mother Cindy is a musician and teacher. But since Rachel’s death her parents and her sister Sarah have not returned to their previous jobs. Craig and Cindy set up the Rachel Corrie Foundation in their daughter’s memory to promote peace and justice in the Middle East and are constantly on the move, addressing schools and giving media interviews. They highlight human rights abuses suffered by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and lobby to have Rachel’s death properly investigated. They are also trying to realize Rachel’s wish for Rafah to be twinned with Olympia, and have visited Rafah twice.

The fifth anniversary of Rachel’s death is being marked not only by publication of “Let Me Stand Alone”, but also by new productions of “My Name is Rachel Corrie”. The play is currently being produced in Israel for the first time, in Arabic translation. After its Haifa premier the play will tour a number of places in Israel and the West Bank.

The New England premier of the play was held a few days ago at the New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, Massachusetts. It is a sign of the sensitivities surrounding this dramatization of the words of a young woman who was an ardent supporter of the Palestinians that the theatre felt it necessary to “balance” it with a play on Israel.

The theatre originally intended to pair the play with the one-act play “To Pay the Price”, about the late Yonatan Netanyahu (brother of former Israeli prime minister Binyamin), regarded in Israel as a war hero, but the Netanyahu family vetoed the idea. So the Corrie play was instead paired with the solo show “Pieces” written and performed by Israeli-American Zohar Tirosh, and based on her experiences of serving in the Israeli military in the mid-1990s. The staging of the two plays was accompanied by relevant panel discussions, films and readings.

The theatre critic of the Boston Herald, Jenna Scherer, protested at this attempted balancing act. She wrote: “Art shouldn’t require even-handedness...Issues don’t get more hot-button than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a subject on which you’d be hard-pressed to find an objective account. But shouldn’t that be all the more reason to allow an individual voice to ring clear without apology? Isn’t theatre supposed to incite people to think and react?” She praised the Corrie play as “a superlative work, here in a superlative production by director David R Gammons and actor Stacy Fischer.”

“My Name is Rachel Corrie” had its genesis in the moving e-mails Rachel had sent from Gaza, published by the London-based Guardian newspaper some days after her death. The e-mails, and Rachel’s journal, were edited into a play by the well-known actor Alan Rickman, who also directed the play, and by journalist Katharine Viner.

The production at the Royal Court Theatre in 2005 won the Theatregoer’s Choice Awards for best director and best new play, as well as the best solo performance for actress Megan Dodds. The Guardian’s critic Michael Billington described it as “a stunning account of one woman’s passionate response to a particular situation. And the passion comes blazing through in Corrie’s eloquent reaction to their father’s enquiries about Palestinian violence. As she says, if we lived where tanks and soldiers and bulldozers could destroy our homes at any moment and where our lives were completely strangled, wouldn’t we defend ourselves as best we could?”

The play was to have been transferred to the New York Theatre Workshop in March 2006, but the theatre decided to indefinitely postpone the play out of fear of the reaction of certain Jewish and pro-Israeli groups. Rickman and Viner denounced the decision, and withdrew the play, declaring: “This is censorship born out of fear, and the New York Theatre Workshop, the Royal Court, New York audiences – all of us are the losers.” There were also protests from such theatre luminaries as actress Vanessa Redgrave and playwrights Harold Pinter and Tony Kushner. The play was eventually staged off-Broadway in autumn 2006.

The continuing difficulty over the staging of the play in the USA - as shown by the recent controversy over the production in Watertown - shows how some quarters are alarmed at the continuing power of Rachel’s eloquent words five years after her death. Critics of Corrie and of the ISM allege that she was militantly pro-Palestinian, and naïve to go to Gaza, and they dispute the circumstances of her death and the claimed culpability of the IDF bulldozer operator. But as Corrie’s testimony shows, she was no hot-headed, blinkered fanatic, but a highly-intelligent, sensitive young person who felt she could not just stand by in the face of Palestinian suffering. And in these days of an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Gaza, her message still rings out loud and clear.

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette March 17 2008

Book of Palestinian embroidery motifs

The embroidery with which Palestinian women have traditionally decorated their dresses is one of the most characteristic elements of Palestinian material culture. In her recent book Palestinian Embroidery Motifs: A Treasury of Stitches 1850-1950 - published jointly by Melisende Publishing of London and Rimal Publications of Nicosia - Margarita Skinner focuses on the motifs used in embroidery. They include the Tall Palm motif (also known as Ears of Wheat) of the Ramallah area, Scissors and Roses from Gaza, the Key of the Heart from Bethlehem and the Cypress Tree motifs found all over Palestine.

Skinner writes: “The embroidered dresses of the Palestinian women are very much like Persian carpets. They are not only unusually beautiful. They also tell stories.” In the Negev, unmarried Bedouin girls and widows wear dresses with blue embroidery. Once a widow remarries, red or pink embroidery is added.

Skinner wrote the book in association with her friend of 40 years Widad Kamel Kawar, the legendary Amman-based collector of Palestinian costume. Skinner documents more than 200 motifs, giving their names in Arabic and English and identifying the areas of Palestine from which they come. Falak Shawwa’s photographs capture the artistry and vibrant colours of the motifs, and the splendour of festive dresses. There are also diagrams of each motif.

Assembling information on the motifs was not easy. The names of motifs change from area to area, and often from one generation to another. “What is a Moon in Ramallah is a Star in Hebron. What is an Orange Branch to a grandmother is a Rose Branch to the granddaughter,” says Kawar.It is not known exactly when women in Palestine started to put thousands of stitches on dresses, coats, jackets, veils and cushions. Research on Palestine embroidery has found no examples earlier than the 19th century.

In the 1930s, the French company Dollfus, Mieg & Co (DMC) distributed pattern books that introduced foreign motifs. Before long, these appeared alongside traditional motifs on women’s costume. DMC also introduced perle cotton thread. Previously, women had used lustrous floss silk thread from Syria.

In Palestinian villages, the tending of chickens and selling of eggs was the domain of women, who used this source of income to buy thread and fabric. Girls grew up watching their mothers embroidering, and learnt the skill from the age of about ten.

The main stitches used in Palestinian embroidery are cross-stitch and couching. In couching a thick thread is positioned on top of the fabric, and a thinner thread is stitched over it to keep it in place. This gives a curving design, of which there are many examples in Palestinian Embroidery Motifs.
Each area of Palestine had characteristic embroidery. Ramallah, together with Bethlehem and Beit Dajan, was well known for its lavish embroidery. The embroidery on a festive dress could have 200,000 cross-stitches. Bethlehem’s skill in the art of couching made it “the Paris of Palestinian village fashion”.

The book organises the motifs within six sections. The first consists of border motifs, while the others sections are based on the sources of inspiration: daily life, fauna, the garden and fields, nature and the environment, and trees.

From the mid-20th century Palestinian embroidery started to decline. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war uprooted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom ended in up refugee camps. “With their own local culture dispersed, they lost parts of their village identity and the embroidered motifs of certain areas became mixed with others in names and motif arrangements,” Kawar notes.


A style referred to as The New Dress developed in refugee camps. This dress tells us only that the wearer is Palestinian, and indicates little about its origins. Some organizations now run modern embroidery projects, helping to keep skills alive.

Skinner hopes that her book will help to preserve and revive the heritage of Palestinian embroidery. “Let the stitches speak to us again,” she says.

Susannah Tarbush

original of article published by qantara.de

David Hare's The Vertical Hour

At long last theatre goers in London have had the chance to see the UK premiere of the celebrated British playwright Sir David Hare’s latest play “The Vertical Hour”, at the Royal Court Theatre. Seats sold out early, with the play selling faster than any new play in the history of the theatre. “The Vertical Hour” is Hare’s second Iraq-related play. The first, “Stuff Happens”, took its title from the phrase uttered by the then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in shrugging off the looting of Baghdad during the 2003 invasion.

There was shock in 2006 when Hare decided not to stage the premier of “The Vertical Hour” at the National Theatre in London, where 13 of his previous works had premiered. Instead, he took the play straight to New York where it was directed on Broadway by the British director Sam Mendes with a cast including Hollywood star Julianne Moore and British actor Bill Nighy.

Hare explained that the reason for his decision was his frustration over the way the National Theatre had handled “Stuff Happens” two years earlier when far more people wanted to see the play than could get tickets. In Hare’s view, the National closed the production of that play too early.

“The Vertical Hour” deals with the Iraq war in a more oblique manner than “Stuff Happens”. It explores the attitudes of individuals towards the war, and the interweaving of political arguments and private lives. Hare has a gift for making compelling theatre from political discussions between his characters. “The Vertical Hour” has virtually no action, but the characters are far from being mere mouthpieces articulating opposing positions on Iraq and so-called liberal interventionism. For a play with a serious theme, there were plenty of jokes and laughs over the ironies of politics and the Iraq war, and over the deceptions and delusions of personal behavior.


The play revolves around a visit by US academic Nadia Blye (Indira Varma), and her British boyfriend Philip (Tom Riley) to a house in a remote corner of England where Nadia meets for the first time Philip’s doctor father Oliver (Anton Lesser).

The part of Nadia is a plum role for British actress Varma (34), who was born in the city of Bath in south-west England to an Indian father and Swiss mother. Since making her acting debut in Mira Nair’s film “Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love” in 1996, Varma has tackled a wide variety of roles in film, theatre and TV. Nadia is her biggest theatre role to date.

Nadia is a former foreign correspondent who is now a professor of international relations at Yale University, appearing frequently on TV and at think tanks. Slender in build, with fine facial bone structure, Varma portrays the lively Nadia as strong but with an underlying fragility.

Anton Lesser, who plays Oliver, is a leading British classical actor. He is shorter than Varma, and has a lightweight physique compared with his physical therapist son. And yet something in him draws Nadia. Oliver is witty, waspish and enjoys playing psychological games. It is not altogether clear whether his aim is to undermine his son, and influence Nadia. He quotes to Nadia the definition of a doctor as “someone who tells you the truth and stays with you until the end.”


Oliver has retreated from life for a reason that is at first a secret, and is now living in a virtually unpopulated part of Shropshire, on the English-Welsh border. He was once a highly-regarded kidney specialist but is now a general practitioner.

Nadia supported the invasion of Iraq, whereas Oliver was opposed to it, and from the start he engages her in verbal sparring. Nadia had been invited to the White House to advise George W Bush on Iraq. She was in favor of what she insists on calling “the liberation...I don’t think the president would have asked me if I wasn’t.” She believes strongly that the invasion of Iraq was justified to end the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. This belief in “humane intervention” is partly rooted in her experiences as a foreign correspondent in the Balkans where the West did nothing to alleviate the suffering and 300,000 people were killed. She says of Iraq: “I don’t think the mess that’s followed invalidates the original decision.”

Oliver uses a medical analogy to explain his opposition to the invasion. “I knew who the surgeon was going to be, so I had a fair idea of what the operation would look like.” He argues that “the West’s been using Islam as a useful enemy for as long as anyone can remember. ‘Shall we go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard? Shall we not?’ It’s from Henry V.”

There are unresolved undercurrents between the three characters. Philip has a lot of suppressed rage towards his father for what he sees as his cruel philandering while married to Philip’s mother. Oliver prefers to explain it to Nadia as an “open marriage”. Oliver advises Philip not to show self doubt in Nadia’s presence, and says she picked Philip out because he appeared to be strong. Philip suspects Oliver of having an intention to try to seduce Nadia away from him,

It is only in the course of a long discussion with Oliver during a sleepless night that Nadia admits that in Iraq “we certainly made a mess of it didn’t we?” She is upset, and momentarily she and Oliver hold hands. She tells him of her love affair with a danger-loving Polish reporter she was with in the Balkans and then met again in Iraq. After the trauma of the love affair she went back to America and met Philip, but the visit to Oliver has shaken up her ease in the safety of her relationship with Philip.

Oliver confesses the secret of why he retreated to Shropshire. He had given a lift in a car to a woman he had been having an affair with and the car crashed, killing the woman as well as an old man in another car. The woman turned out to be married, and her husband had threatened to sue him.

The play is framed by first and last scenes in which Nadia is in tutor mode with a student. The first is a young man who declares he is love with her, despite having a fiancée. The final scene is with a black female student, Terri, who has decided to leave Yale after a painful breakup with her boyfriend. At the end of their discussion Nadia says to her: “I used to be a war correspondent. Recently I’ve noticed I miss it. I’m going back to Iraq”. Philip has already told the audience that after Nadia and Philip returned to America he heard nothing from them for some time. “In fact, next time I read Nadia’s name it was in another context entirely. When I saw what it was, forgive me, it made me smile.”

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, March 3 2008

credit for photos: Keith Pattison

Omar Sabbagh's poetry published by 'The Reader'

The latest issue of The Reader magazine features poetry from Omar Sabbagh, the London-based Lebanese poet who has been steadily making his mark on the British literary scene. This isn't the first time Sabbagh's poetry has been published in the magazine: 'Editor's Pick' in the Liverpool-based publication's issue 29, dedicated to "voices that should be heard", describes him as "one of The Reader's favourite new poets".

When The Reader published poetry by Sabbagh in issue 27, it said: "We have great new poetry by Omar Sabbagh, a poet (The Reader says) to look out for in the future. He’s got a strong voice, a decisive standpoint which makes you aware of his presence in the poems and which makes the sheer delicacy of his observations a surprise as well as a pleasure. More than anything when you read his poems, you are aware of the solidity and lightness of life."

Sabbagh is finishing an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Review, Agenda Online Broadsheet, Stand and The Warwick Review, and Stand will be publishing further poems from him.

Sabbagh's fellow contributors in issue 29 include poets David Constantine, John Kinsella, Kenneth Steven, Jeffrey Wainwright and Penny Fearn, as well as the novelist and critic A S Byatt (examining the ways that "novelists have taken up the slack after the absconding of God", Jewish novelist and essayist Howard Jacobson (taking apart Richard Dawkins), an "unusual" interview with Mark Rylance (actor and theatre director, starring in the new Hollywood release 'The Other Boleyn Girl'). Novelist Joanna Trollope is among those participating in a roundtable on William Wordsworth.

The Reader was launched in 1997 by three teachers from Liverpool University's Continuing Education department. "We are still providing a platform for personal and passionate responses to books, as well as identifying new and exciting writers."

Anissa Helou's book on Savory Baking of the Med

In the 14 years since her first cookery book “Lebanese Cuisine” was published, the Lebanese-Syrian cookery writer Anissa Helou has established herself as one of the world’s foremost and most prolific authors on Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food.

In her latest, and sixth, book “Savory Baking from the Mediterranean: Focaccias, Flatbreads, Rusks, Tarts, and other Breads”, she reveals the amazing variety of tempting goodies that are produced around the Mediterranean from bread doughs and pastry.

“All the peoples of the Mediterranean believe that no meal is complete without bread,” Helou points out. Her recipes range from simple breads that accompany main courses to more complex filled breads and pastries which are meals in themselves. Occupying the middle ground are the many savory baked items to be eaten as meze, hors d’oeuvres, snacks, and other little bites, some traditionally made by home cooks, others by street vendors or small family-run bakeries.

“Savory Baking”, published in New York by the HarperCollins imprint William Morrow, comes with glowing reviews on its back cover from the likes of the veteran Middle East food writer Claudia Roden, Mark H Furstenberg - founder of Marvelous Market and The BreadLiine and co-owner of Ma-Mi Bistro and Bakery - and Carol Field, author of “The Italian Baker”, “Celebrating Italy”, and “Italy in Small Bites”.

As with previous volumes in the Helou oeuvre, “Savory Baking” is as much a culinary travel work as a cookery book and is a highly enjoyable read. Helou revels in travel and culinary observation, and while preparing the book she stayed with friends in a number of Mediterranean countries. They introduced her to local experts in preparing breads and other savory baked items.

Among the many places she visited was a bakery in Kfar Rumman, south Lebanon, where she learnt from “a wonderful old-fashioned baker”, Jawad Yussef Daher, how to make the Mishtah Bread which is unique to that area. The ingredients include whole wheat flour, cracked wheat (jreesh), spices, and mahlep – the tiny dried nut found in the kernel of the sour cherry, which is ground into a fragrant powder.

On the Greek island of Kassos Helou watched a woman make Artos, a bread with subtle sweet and spicy flavors which is baked on various saints’ days. In Marrakesh her friend Mortada Chami, owner of the Stylia restaurant, organized a demonstration of the special skills involved in making the leaf-thin pastry known as warqa.

Scattered through the book’s 339 pages are black and white photographs taken by Helou, which have a timeless quality. As Helou says: “I try in the text that introduces the recipes to give a sense of the depth of tradition – in techniques, in ingredients and in the origins of specific recipes – that underlies contemporary Mediterranean savory baking.”


Historically, bread and baking first began in the Fertile Crescent, and Helou’s own engagement with Mediterranean baking began on the edge of the Crescent. The daughter of a Syrian father and Lebanese mother she grew up in Beirut, but as a child she used to spend the summer at her aunt’s house in the Syrian village of Meshta el-Helou.

At that time the village had no electricity, running water or store, and Helou’s aunt made everything at home including bread cooked in a tannour pit oven. Helou vividly recalls her aunt inserting her arm deep into the tannour to slap circles of dough against its walls, peeling the cooked loaves off a few seconds later. Helou has remained an enthusiastic student of Mediterranean baking ever since.

In the introduction to her book, Helou provides useful tips for the home baker, but her attitude is relaxed and she says: “In fact, part of the fun of home baking is the somewhat unpredictable nature of it. One day, your bread will rise perfectly and the slashes will open up beautifully. Another day, the results will not be so perfect, though they will still be good.” She explains how to shape dough into loaves, which she considers the most difficult part of baking.

There are interesting links between bakery products in different Mediterranean countries. The family of Italian flatbreads known as Focaccia, of which Helou gives examples from different parts of Italy (featuring ingredients such as cheese, potato or walnut), is equivalent to Fougasse in the south of France and Fouace in the north.

Crunchy breadsticks coated with sesame seeds are called Grissini in Sicily, and Ka’k in Lebanon and Syria. Helou used to think that the practice of sprinkling sesame seeds on bread in Sicily dated back to the Arab occupation, but she then found it mentioned in the writings of the Greek physician Dioscorides in the first century AD. It thus predates the Arab invasion by several centuries.


There are two basic types of Mediterranean bread: flat and raised. Flatbreads are found in various shapes and forms throughout the region, although one-layered varieties are mostly found in the western Mediterranean and two- or multi-layered ones in the eastern part. Raised breads are mainly produced in the western region. Raised loaves may be divided according to whether they are leavened naturally, using sourdough, or artificially, using fresh or dried yeast.

Bread doughs are also used to make many types of savory pastries. In the western Mediterranean the dough or pastry casing is thick or thin, and made in one or several layers, while in the Eastern and southern parts the casing is generally thin and often made in several layers. Savory pastries are useful for two main purposes: to recycle leftovers, and to serve as portable meals that can be taken to work or on journeys.

Among the Pizza-type recipes in the book is one for the famous Lebanese flatbread Manaqish bil-Za’tar, translated as “Thyme Pizza”, which is served plain or with strained yoghurt (labneh). Its sister product, Manaqish bil-Kishk, is topped with the dried bulghur and yoghurt powder that is a vital foodstuff for inhabitants of the Lebanese mountains. Alongside recipes for Italian Pizzas and the French Pissaladiere, there is one for Turkish Eggplant Pide topped with red peppers, eggplant and tomatoes.

Medfouna is a Moroccan flatbread stuffed with meat, which Helou titles “Berber Hamburger All- in One”. Sometimes flatbreads are crispy, such as Sardinian crackers (Pane Carasau), very thin circles of dough baked until they harden . Khobz Ramadan are date-filled breads found in the souqs of Tripoli, Lebanon and Damascus and Aleppo during the Holy Month of Ramadan. Tunisian Spicy Breads (Touarits) are made from two circles of semolina flour dough sealed around a filling including chilies and red peppers. They are related to the Moroccan multilayered breads known as R’ghayef , and the M’hajjib bread of Algeria.

Many of the savory pastries featured in the book are from Middle Eastern countries, such as Turkish Meat Boreks, Moroccan Triangles with Chicken or Minced Meat, Lebanese Cheese or Strained Yoghurt Triangles and Lebanese Square Meat Pies (known as Sreyjatt or Sfiha). From Syria there are Cheese Fatayer, and from Tunisia Meat Crescents.

Helou’s book is likely to delight all who read it – except perhaps those on Atkins-style low-carbohydrate diets. And even they may find their willpower wilting in the face of her mouth-watering descriptions of Mediterranean baked specialties.

Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette February 18 2008

Kaveh Golestan's life and work celebrated in new book

When in 2003 the Iranian photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Kaveh Golestan stepped on a landmine in northern Iraq and was instantly killed, the Middle East lost one of its greatest recorders of the tumultuous events in the region. And beyond his skills as a photographer and filmmaker, his companions and colleagues in Iran and in the world of international photojournalism lost a precious friend and mentor who is still deeply missed.

Five years on from Golestan’s death the German publisher Hatje Cantz, in collaboration with the Prince Claus Fund Library, has produced an enduring tribute to the man and his work in the form of the book, “Kaveh Golestan 1950-2003: Recording the Truth in Iran”. The handsome volume is jointly edited by the journalist and editor Malu Halasa and Golestan’s wife and fellow photographer Hengameh Golestan.

The large format of the 168-page book does justice to the 128 black and white images it features, some of which spread extend over double pages. One of the pictures that stretches across two pages is an emblematic photograph showing Ayatollah Khomeini making his first public appearance at the Alavi School February 4 1979, after his arrival back from exile. In another double-spread image, taken in Mahabad in 1980, Kurdish children rush towards the photographer, their faces full of excitement.

Golestan’s camera takes us not only inside the dramatic political events that engulfed Iran, but also intimately into the lives of individuals. He focused equally on the epoch-defining events, and on forgotten, marginalized people: the poor, prostitutes, the mentally handicapped. Among the upheavals he captured on film were the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf war, the US-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the invasion and war in Iraq. He was particularly concerned to record the impact of these events on the people who were most immediately affected by them.



The photographs in the book are divided into seven main sections, each introduced by a one-page essay by Golestan. The first section shows prostitutes in the Shahr-e No (New City) area of Tehran in 1975-77. Golestan writes of how the people in this area lived at an “almost subhuman level”. The majority of the prostitutes’ clients were poor rural men, who would transmit sexual diseases back to their wives in their villages.

The laborers portrayed in a series of photographs taken in Tehran in 1977 were rural migrants. They worked in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, enduring excruciating physical labor in dangerous conditions lacking the minimum health and safety protocols. “Due to insufficient wages, they are often hungry and undernourished, forced to live in shoddy shacks with only nylon bags as roofing,” Golestan wrote. He was perturbed to find that many children worked as manual laborers.

Golestan’s photographs of mentally disturbed children were taken in 1977 in the largest mental hospital in Tehran. Pumped full of drugs, the children “survive in a vegetative state similar to the plants grown in the pots placed around the rooms of the hospital”. Staff would chain them to radiators or tie their hands with string, ignoring their suffering.

Golestan’s extensive chronicling of the Iranian Revolution in 1978-80 began when a friend alerted him to demonstrations in Qom. He travelled there, and “with my photos I managed to capture the very first sparks of the Revolution.” He also saw the first bloodshed of the Revolution, when police started throwing tear gas and shooting demonstrators.

One section of the book is devoted to photographs of the uprising in Kurdistan in 1988-89. Golestan covered Kurdish social and political developments in the north of Iraq for more than 10 years, and was only eight miles from Halabja when it was attacked with chemical weapons in 1988. His extraordinary photographs of the Qaderi Dervishes of Kurdistan show groups of long-haired men dancing in ecstasy, their hair flung in the air.

The Iran-Iraq war 1980-88 had a profound impact on Golestan: “I spent eight years looking at death through my camera.” He was amazed at how youngsters were willing to die for their beliefs. “I felt I had to show this through my photos. I was in search of the deep human feelings that were buried within each person.” He became addicted to the chemical rush to the brain during the conflict and often felt like a vulture. “Death had become my companion and I was beginning to have psychological problems.”

When he saw the dismembered bodies of young children in Abadan, “the feelings of shock and violence were so extreme that I felt that it was my duty to let the world know about these horrors, to understand the suffering.” His photographs show in harrowing detail the impact of the ghastly Iran-Iraq war on humans, whether fighters or civilians. One image is of a chador-clad woman atop a tank, wielding a Kalashnikov. The caption says that when this photograph was published in the Guardian newspaper, a reader wrote in to complain about the woman’s mishandling of the weapon.

On one occasion he was forced to take cover in a trench “filled with the bloated and purple corpses of Iraqi soldiers. I was forced to hide in the trench for six hours with them – in the grave, in the world of death, ultimate annihilation.” He writes that after the war ended “I found that it had left me with a constant feeling of anxiety and unease. I do not have much emotion left to give. I have already seen the end.”

Golestan’s work was acclaimed worldwide, and in 1979 he was given a Robert Capa Award for his photographic coverage of the Iranian Revolution, which was the major foreign story of that year. He was present in Iran throughout the tumultuous process by which Iran was transmuted into an Islamic republic, from Ayatollah Khomeini’s ’s return from exile in Paris in 1979 to his funeral ten years later.

Malu Halasa notes that Golestan was the only Iranian photojournalist with a continuing presence in Iran from before the 1979 Revolution until his death in 2003. “He developed a distinct aesthetic long before the Revolution, challenging notions of beauty and honesty in the Shah’s Iran, where the poor and dispossessed were, for the most part, invisible,” she writes. She describes how in 1977 he hid his camera in a bag of fruit and befriended the prostitutes who inhabited dilapidated buildings in Shahr-e No.

Golestan’s work frequently aroused the ire of the authorities. When Britain’s Channel Four TV in 1991 broadcast his film “Recording the Truth”, about journalists in Iran, he was subjected to two years’ house arrest. As well as being stripped of his press card and barred from leaving Tehran, he was made to lecture at the art college at the University of Tehran where, Halasu notes, “he inspired a generation of photojournalists and reporters.”

The essays that comprise the first part of the book include six contributions from people who knew Golestan well. Among them is the veteran BBC journalist Jim Muir who was with Golestan when he was killed. Muir was the BBC correspondent in Iran between 1999 and 2004, and during that time, he and Golestan covered events in many parts of Iran, as well as in neighboring Afghanistan and northern Iraq.

Muir recalls how on what would be the last day of his life, Golestan’s thoughts seemed to be firmly focused on his own identity and how he related to the events he and Muir were covering and anticipating. Although he had by then been a TV cameraman for some years, he still identified himself primarily as a photographer. He suddenly said to Muir: “I am a war photographer... It is in situations like this that I am truly me.’”

Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette February 25 2008

IPAF shortlist announced

The judges with Joumana Haddad

Six books shortlisted for Arabic fiction prize

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) attracted worldwide media attention last week when the six judges of the prize, now in its first year, appeared at a press conference in central London to announce the shortlist of six novels for an award worth a total of $60,000 to the winner.

The winner, to be announced at a gala dinner in Abu Dhabi on March 10, will receive a prize of $50,000 as well as the $10,000 that each of the shortlisted authors is automatically awarded. In addition, the winning book is guaranteed translation into English.

In all, 131 novels by authors from 18 Arab countries were submitted for the prize, but Egyptian and Lebanese writers dominate the shortlist. The two Egyptians on the list are Baha Taher with “Sunset Oasis” (published by Al-Shorooq) and Mekkaoui Said with “Swan Song” (Al Dar). Lebanon is represented by Jabbour Douaihy with “June Rain” (Dar An-Nahar) and May Menassa with “Walking in the Dust” (Riad El-Rayess). The other novels in the contest are “The Land of Purgatory” by Jordanian Elias Farkouh (Al Mouassassa Al Arabiya, and Azminah) and “In Praise of Hate” by Syrian Khaled Khalifa (Amisa).

Seventy-eight per cent of the 131 novels submitted were by men, and only 22 per cent by women. By far the largest share of novels, 33, came from Egyptian authors, followed by Syrian writers (16), Lebanese (14) and Tunisian (10). Six books by Saudi writers were entered.

IPAF was officially launched in Abu Dhabi in April 2007, in association with the Booker Prize Foundation of London and with financial and other support from the Emirates Foundation. One of its main aims is “to increase global readership of Arabic literature through the widest possible publication and distribution of contemporary Arabic fiction in translation.”

The Booker Prize Foundation administers Britain’s most prestigious literary prize, the £50,000 Man Booker Prize, which this year celebrates its 40th anniversary. Inevitably, the new Arabic prize is widely (if incorrectly) dubbed “the Arabic Booker”. Arabic is only the second language in the world to enjoy a Booker spin-off award: in 1992 a Russian version of the prize was established.

The sense of drama at the press conference, held at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) in Piccadilly, was heightened by the fact that the identity of the judges had until then been kept secret. This was so as “to ensure the independence and integrity of the selection process.” Since last July, the judges had each read their way through almost all the 131 novels in competition (a few novels were disqualified before this stage).

When the judges took their seats on the press conference panel they were revealed to be the Iraqi author and journalist and cofounder of Banipal magazine Samuel Shimon (judges’ chairman); London-based Syrian writer and journalist Ghalia Kabbani; Palestinian author and critic Faissal Darraj; British scholar, author and translator Paul Starkey, who is head of Durham University’s Arabic Department and Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World; and the Moroccan writer and critic Mohammed Berrada and his fellow Moroccan, poet Mohammed Bennis.

The prize is managed by a 12-member independent Board of Trustees from the Arab world and the UK, representing a mix of writers, experts in Arabic literature and translation, and personalities from publishing, the media and academia. Jonathan Taylor, interim chair of the Board of Trustees and chair of the Booker Prize Foundation, told the press conference: “The purpose of the prize is to secure recognition, reward and readership for outstanding Arabic literary fiction of the highest quality, regardless of the nationality, religion, gender or age of the writer.” He announced that the philanthropist, anthropologist and publisher Sigrid Rausing has pledged to fund the translation of the winning work into English.

Maytha Al Habsi [right], director of communications at the Emirates Foundation, said: “As a foundation we hope and expect that the prize will inspire Arab authors, new and established, to apply their minds and spirits to the creation of high-quality literature that touches both our minds and hearts.”
It is also hoped that the prize “will encourage the translation of new Arabic literature into many of the world’s major languages” so that non-Arabs everywhere will have “the opportunity to read and absorb what the finest Arab writers are saying.”

The IPAF administrator, Lebanese poet, translator and journalist Joumana Haddad, believes that literature is the best tool for understanding the world and making it a better place. “Indeed, we have the best tool of intercultural and intercivilizational dialogue in books, provided we know how to choose these books – because a good part of what is being promoted, translated and exported from side to side is unfortunately enhancing the divide and the distorted images instead of breaking the pattern. “

Haddad said that IPAF “aims to be different, and by different we mean independent, transparent, objective, fair, bold and pioneering. It aspires to give the right Arabic books the local and international attention they deserve.”

Samuel Shimon said that the judges had arrived at their shortlist through two closed discussion sessions the previous day. The first session came up with a longlist of 16 titles, which was then whittled down to the final six.

Shimon explained what it was about each of the six novels that had led the judges to put them on the shortlist. For example, in the novel “In Praise of Hate”, Syrian novelist Khalid Khalifa narrates “the experience of oppression under the fundamentalist organizations and from inside a Syrian society deprived of democracy, in a multi-levelled language, and through characters who are torn apart facing an uncertain future.” The Lebanese novelist May Menassa in “Walking in the Dust” praises memory that is “scarred by the horrors of the war and loss in today’s world. The novel is written in a flowing style and rich prose, with a poetic dimension which suits the universal pain it is dealing with.”

Shimon described “Sunset Oasis” by Egyptian Baha Taher as “a fine work of fiction. Depending on the metaphor of the journey that crystallizes the existential crisis of a defeated man, he deals with many broad human questions.”


Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, February 4 2008




above: Joumana Haddad and Mohammed Berrada

Banipal Books' new titles by Mahmoud Shukair and Issa J Boullata

With the simultaneous publication of the short story collections “Mordechai’s Moustache and his Wife’s Cats” by Mahmoud Shukair and “A Retired Gentleman” by Issa J Boullata, Banipal Books of London brings us the work of two accomplished storytellers who were born in Jerusalem. There is a further link between the two writers: Boullata has translated from Arabic the four main short stories, plus 20 “vignettes”, in Shukair’s collection.

Shukair, born in 1941, studied at Damascus University from where he has an MA in Philosophy and Sociology. He worked for many years as a teacher and journalist, was twice imprisoned by the Israelis for a total of nearly two years, and in 1975 was deported to Lebanon. After living in Berlin, Amman and Prague he returned to Jerusalem in 1993, and has been editor in chief of the weekly magazine Al-Talia’a (The Vanguard) and Dafatir Thaqafiya (Cultural File).

Shukair has written 25 books, among them nine short story collections, folktales and books for children. He has also written plays, TV series and numerous articles for the press. He has been writing short stories since 1962, many of which were published in the magazine Al-Ufuq al-Jadid, or New Horizon.

Shukair is a master of the satirical short story that shines a light on quirky angles of the multifaceted experience of the Palestinians, particularly under Israeli occupation. He is also adept at the very short story or vignette, of which more than 40 are included in the collection.

Issa J Boullata took the path of academia in the West, obtaining a PhD in Arabic literature from London University, and then serving as Professor of Arabic Literature at McGill University in Montreal until his retirement in 2004. He is an award-winning translator, and the author of several works including the novel “A’id ila al-Quds” (“Returning to Jerusalem”) and a biography of the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. His short stories are set mostly among Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian immigrants in Canada and the US. The stories are humane and tender, often humorous but also sad.

Growing up in Jerusalem has left an indelible mark on the two writers and their work. Both have written accounts, published in these collections, of how the Jerusalem cultural environment shaped their early literary development. For Shukair, the early 1960s were a time “when Jerusalem celebrated culture and writers had a role in the city, in complete contrast to today”.
In his essays “My journey in writing” and “Hemingway in Jerusalem”, Shukair traces his attachment to the short story to the launch of New Horizon in 1961. “The appearance of the magazine at this time, I believe, played a major role in bringing us into the arena of creative writing, in refining our talents, and in focusing our attention on international literature.” He and his friends were known as the “New Horizon generation”. They bought books translated in Beirut and Cairo, and loved sitting and discussing in Jerusalem coffee shops. When he read the first issue of New Horizon, the short stories it contained, some of which were on the Palestinian naqba (catastrophe) of 1948, “gripped me with a passion such that I started writing stories full of rhetoric and tradition.”

The editor of New Horizon, the poet Amin Shanar, “had the important role of paving the difficult way forward for our generation, which profited so much from his patronage.” Shukair read books by Palestinian and Arab writers, and then moved on to writers in English, translating stories by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and others. He particularly valued the way in which Hemingway “touches only the tip of the iceberg and leaves the rest buried deep below the ocean’s surface. By leaving his stories open to interpretation in this way, Hemingway lends his stories a lasting and universal significance.”

In his stories, Shukair has an eye for absurdity and the essential role played of fantasy in allowing people to transcend the shackles of their situation. In the story “Shakira’s Picture” the cousin of the first-person narrator has queued fruitlessly several times at the Israeli Ministry of Interior in an effort to get a document to allow him to travel abroad. When a guard asks him his name, and he replies Talha Shakirat, the guard asks him if he knows the singer Shakira, of whom he is a fan. The narrator’s cousin claims she is a member of his family, and this supposed family relationship with Shakira is the edifice upon which the short story is constructed, to amusing effect. The cousin’s father throws himself into the pretence, convinced it will help him get a new identity card which will enable him to go to Spain and on the Haj.

Taxi driver Kadhim Ali, the central character of “Ronaldo’s Seat” claims to be in e-mail contact with the footballer Ronaldo, who has promised to come with his wife and child to spend a month or two as his guest. Kadhim reserves the front seat of his taxi for Ronaldo, and falls under suspicion of saving the seat for women, or of being a collaborator with Israel.

Mordechai, in the title story of the collection, is an Israeli reservist with a handlebar moustache. Disliking the views of Israeli leftists, he volunteers to serve at the checkpoint of Qalandiya near Ramallah. This brings him for the first time face to face with Palestinians, and he tries to suppress his feelings of sympathy for them. Then he finds that twirling the ends of his moustache brings forth farting sounds from the mouths of the queuing Palestinians, Even his Israeli colleagues laugh behind his back at this mockery of him.

In “My Cousin Condoleezza” the narrator realizes that his cousin Matheela, divorced from a college friend of his, is like Condoleezza Rice in being a black-haired “shrew”. His mother is pressuring him to take her as a second wife. He protests that he cannot live under the same roof as Condoleezza Rice. He dreams he is marrying Condoleezza, whose father is Rumsfeld.

Issa J Boullata writes in his essay “Books and I” of the joy of reading his first book in Arabic, “The Little Red Hen”, at the age of eight in 1937. He became a great admirer of the renowned Palestinian educator and author Khalil Sakakini. He writes of his subsequent excursions into reading at school, and in his father’s extensive collection of Arabic books, some in translation into French, and at the Jerusalem YMCA.
The first story in Boullata’s collection, “Without a Court Trial” is set under Jordanian rule in 1957. Two friends who have been celebrating at a restaurant the departure of one of them for the US the next day are taken to prison on the whim of the military governor dining in the same restaurant.

In Boullata’s stories past events in the Middle East continue to shape lives. In “Search for Saleema” a man continues for the rest of his life to search for the fiancée from whom he became separated in the 1948 naqba. In “A Retired Gentleman”, retired Montreal multi-millionaire William Shibli has remained a bachelor in the 30 years since his childhood sweetheart from Lebanon, tired of his neglect of her after she came after him to Canada, married someone else. The elderly William strikes up a friendship with a beautiful girl who is researching Arab textile businesses in Montreal. She turns out to be the daughter of his lost love.

“True Love, Mad Love” takes the form of a letter from an obsessed man to Nadia, an Arab-American poet of Palestinian descent. The letter has been found after its writer’s suicide. He had been planning to visit the poet in Boston on his way to Columbia to lecture on Arab-American poetry, but she had told him by e-mail not to come. He is clearly obsessed by a relationship that has been conducted only by e-mail and phone since he met her for a few minutes at an Arab-American poetry reading a year earlier. He declares that his is “a true Arab love that clings and does not let go.”

The collections of stories by Boullata and Shukair are valuable contributions to literature by Palestinians available in English. Written from inside the universe of Palestinian experience they avoid the stereotypical portrayals of characters, and show the power of imagination and humor to cross cultural barriers.

Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette December 3 2007

[the covers of both books are watercolours by Nabil Abu Hamad]